Michael Grande – Penultimate IIP Berlin Blog

It’s been a pretty amazing week so far. I went to Copenhagen for the weekend by myself and it was such a liberating experience. For starters, Copenhagen has been on my bucket list for years and I was able to see so much being by myself. I rented a bike for the whole weekend, and lemme tell you, Copenhageners are serious about their biking. There’s a separate traffic lane and traffic light for bikers so it was super easy to get around. I got to go to the beach on the Baltic Sea and climbed a couple castle towers. Copenhagen was such a unique city in the sense that it was the best example of old and new working so perfectly together. I would walk out of my hostel and be thrown out onto a cobblestone street that reminded me of Forbes, and then two blocks away I could stumble onto a castle – and it works – Copenhagen was so beautiful in the sense that new architecture blended so seamlessly into an old Scandinavian city. I made a bunch of random friends and even got to go to Sweden for the day. My last trip will be a repeat to London and then back to America!!

Back at work this week I conducted a little marketing experiment for my boss. Before I got here, they had settled on the name 9point8 for the insoles. They chose that because it it fit with the gravity and Newton theme (the company’s name is NWTN). However, after working with this all summer, my boss decided that it might be time to change the name to something better. So, yesterday I spent most of my day out on Ku’damm (Berlin’s most famous shopping street) getting feedback from strangers on our log, name, and product. It was a little hard at first, as people either only spoke German or thought that I was part of a scam trying to pickpocket them. After a while, I found my groove outside of the Apple store and got some interesting feedback from people. It seemed that our logo and colors are working, but the name for the product just didn’t have a ring to it for people. Obviously just by listening to a small sample of people doesn’t justify changing the product around, but it was cool to be able to get some first hand feedback. We spend all day surrounded by the product so we’re bery biased in our opinions on different aspects. For now, I don’t have much time left but I am definitely going to make sure that I have the Kickstarter page ready to go before I leave next week. I’m going to msis my little NWTN family and they’re taking me out one night next week for drinks to say goodbye. Until next week, see ya!